


The Infamous Breakup Scene

by lucyspringbaird



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV), A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Beautiful, Breakup scene, Depressing, Emotional, F/M, Lovers, Moral Ambiguity, Moral Dilemmas, Poetry, Profound, Sad, vfd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:34:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28129230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucyspringbaird/pseuds/lucyspringbaird
Summary: “The curtain falls just as the knot unties,The silence broken by the one who dies.”The very end of a story where a man met a woman, fell in love, and was never happy again.My take on the Beatrice and Lemony breakup scene, written from both perspectives.
Relationships: Beatrice Baudelaire/Lemony Snicket
Kudos: 6





	1. Lemony

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! Thanks for taking the time to read this! I really appreciate it! Here is some of my interpretation of the events that went on before the whole ‘breakup’ thing, just for context.
> 
> “Lemony and Beatrice, along with siblings and friends, all belong to a secret organization, called the Volunteer Fire Department (VFD), which is filled with code-cracking biblophiles who both literally and figuratively fight the fires of the world. Because there are so many secrets to protect, the legend of the sugar bowl, a mysterious object that every young volunteer is told holds amazing secrets, but in reality holds nothing but air, is born to keep those young volunteers from learning too much too soon. Once the schism occurs, however, only a few number of adult volunteers still remain that know the truth about the sugar bowl, and the new, less experienced volunteers that joined the evil side of the schism search for it with zeal. By the time Lemony and Beatrice are old enough to comprehend their situation, the organization is in shambles, only a fraction of the amazing network of knowledge it had been previously. Lemony, who grew up hearing fantastical stories of the way things used to be, enlisted Beatrice to somehow expel Esme Squalor, a shallow and materialistic double agent and Beatrice’s best friend, from the organization, believing that, once she and her accomplices were kicked out, the organization will be restored to its former glory. He then devises a plan that involves methodically tricking Esme into wanting the sugar bowl, and collecting evidence of her crimes. For compassionate and ethical Beatrice, this plan is iffy at best because it exploits and betrays her friend, and she’s not entirely sure if Esme is really committing crimes in the first place, but she also wants to support Lemony and do the right thing, even if it may hurt someone she cares about.”
> 
> Huge shoutout to the Snicket Sleuth blog, who helped me piece a lot of this together. xx

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lemony’s thoughts and feelings as he is forced to break up with Beatrice. Long story short, he is extremely depressed.

“Please stay.”

Those two words, spoken with the weight of a thousand summers come and gone, a thousand dazzling nights gazing at the stars, a thousand pages written by the wandering hands of a man who’d allowed his heart to run away as the petals of a daffodil on a breeze would, of a thousand memories and lives and loves pulsing through his mind, so palpable, so sweet. Words whispered in his ears in the early hours of the morning, in between sheets and bits of verse, sighed in between kisses and found etched on the bottom of champagne bottles, just for them. He was filled with an insatiable, irrevocable sense of longing and loss and love, such that it was unlike anything any mortal had ever felt before, something that threatened to tear him apart, leaving him wretched, and horrible, and lonely. There was nothing more he longed to do than to run to her, to take her in his arms and kiss her until the world stopped turning and the universe ceased to include them in the great cycle of rebirth that governs it. Tears gushed, dripping like candle wax down his pale face, his eyes shining like two undying flames. He sobbed and sobbed, until he was trembling and weak and his breath came in shallow gasps, strange and mystifying. He was not only allowing the lifeblood of emotion to escape him for the woman of flesh and blood with careless and captivating eyes standing before him, but for the woman made of the crude ghosts of memory that would haunt him into the eternities long after this moment had subsided, and for the way he would hold ever more tenaciously to her until she looked of nothing, felt of nothing. All traces of their love, photographs, memories, books, rings, were to be condemned to the same terrible fates as letters in an old anagram. Hopelessly scattered, with no living soul left to pick up the pieces. Lost.

Then, almost as if it were out of a dream, she stepped pensively forward. Though the space between them was, in actuality, inconsequential, it felt much more fathomless. Things as simple and meaningless as movements forward, he supposed, did little to fill the great chasm of fate and dubiousness that was erected between them. A pair of soft arms, ones he’d known since the beginning of time itself, encircled his midsection, drawing more tears from his eyes. He was slowly bleeding out, a soldier in war.

“The mind has a thousand eyes,  
And the heart but one:  
Yet the light of a whole life dies  
When love is done”  
The moment she glanced up at him, eyes finding eyes as sunlight would find water, was the precise moment he realized that things were right on the uncomfortable cusp of change. Her eyes, two bright flames touched by some sort of Elysian magic, were the only thing that kept him steady through all the times she ended up with blood on her hands due to the vain yearnings of his heart, through all of the secret codes and Victorian costumes and introspective rides in taxis, as the world shifted and undulated and went on its wicked and tumultuous way.

“Let’s… lets run away,” His voice came out softer and more subdued than he’d expected. “From all of this. I don’t care about the sugar bowl, or glory, or the past, or… I only care about you.”

Though he wanted, from the furthest recesses of his mind, to believe his own words, he knew it would never be possible. Everything had failed. He would be framed. He would have to face a long and lonely life on the lam. But for what? He traded his clarity for obscurity, peace for chaos, moral correctness for moral ambiguity. The wretched romanticization and longing for days gone by had cost him everything.

He heard her whisper, in a voice that was unnaturally breathy, “No, we can’t…” before she fell completely silent once more, leaving her unfinished sentence hanging in the air, a heavy blanket of lost things and broken promises hanging between them. How intriguing. The words held most true, most deep, most lasting, by the heart could seldom be expressed through something as fickle as speech.

They stood there, holding each other close, bathed in moonlight, the stars sparkling like lost souls in a vast field of ignorance. Remembering glances. Smiles. Ink. Words on pages. Pages on fingers. Fingers on skin. Daffodils growing. Daffodils in a vase. Daffodils wilting. Daffodils dead.

“Do you think I’ll ever be happy again?” He saw a myriad of emotions adorn her eyes throughout the cadence of the question. A blunt question. Painfully characteristic of her.

Swallowing the lump in his throat, he answers, “My darling, we were happy a thousand times before we stumbled across each other on our respective journeys, and we will be happy a thousand times after our parting.”

Her face, peculiarly drawn and waxy, was mere inches from his own now; he saw heavy, dark things in her countenance, the passionate, inquisitive girl who loved sonnets and gentle music and his sister and everything that made the world a much nicer and more beautiful place, the very epitome of unfettered idealism, had been viciously marred by countless betrayals, countless situations far beyond her own capabilities, and countless sleepless nights brought upon by complex moral questions spinning around and around in her mind as the sun orbits the earth. Then, those lips, lips dripping with more words than she could ever hope to say, lips he knew better than his own, found his for one final summit. Kissing was everything hazy for them, fog, smoke, dreams. He fell into oblivion, an oblivion that transcends rational thought, letting his hands wander, enjoying the sheer intimacy of the moment. Freckles on the nape of her neck, mapping constellations, realms in the sky, a curl a slightly lighter shade of brown than the rest, the curve of her spine. Tears were still spilling across her cheeks; kissing her was much like kissing a summer rain.

Without warning, without pomp or circumstance, without being bogged down by memories or frivolous renderings, his brother’s taxi arrived to collect him, and take him away somewhere his enemies would be unable to pursue him, at least for the time being. An entity with no past and no future, traversing the wide and unfathomable chasm between what is and what will be.

She fumbled with the diamond on her finger, removing it and holding it out to him, destroying every last bit of emotional restraint still left within him. They clung to each other, needing, wanting, searching, a person holding tenaciously to a cliff before they fell into the depths of nothing, sobbing, embracing, ferociously kissing.

“It shouldn’t have to be this way,” were the only, simple words he could utter.

A pair of large arms lifted him off of her, arms he fought against with everything in his being. He couldn’t leave her. He couldn’t leave her. He couldn’t leave her. But, before he could even take one last look at the woman he loved, to find some semblance of the person she used to be in that mournful soul he’d broken, he was already gone.

“The curtain falls just as the knot unties,  
The silence broken by the one who dies.”


	2. Beatrice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beatrice’s perspective on this whole breakup thing. Contrasts to Lemony’s quite a bit.

“Please stay.”  
Those were the only words she could bring herself to say, for what do you say when you look directly into the glittering eyes of all the lost things you’ve ever beheld? Quickly, her eyes flitted away from his, like dragonfly wings, and became very interested in watching her pathetic hands shake. Hands that were awash in the glow of the fluorescent light illuminating the stage door, hands that were mere vessels for the complex skein of emotions tangling itself beneath her skin, hands that were stained with the blood of her enemies.   
Enemies. What an interesting word. What, truly, separates a friend from a foe, good from evil? Is there any general consensus? Or is it all a matter of perception, all a matter of illusion…  
Then, quiet as the breaths taken by a sleepy child, a small sob reverberated off of the city lights, something raw and real in the midst of so much fakery. The light seemed to carry it, mold it, shape it, into something drizzling with profundity, something that suggested a whole cathedral of pasts, presents, and futures converging within his soul. She looked up; a spirit seeing heaven. There, suspended in his eyes. Tears. First a light drizzle, then the storm. Her heart grew heavier with each earnest sob, each tremor that wracked his body, each knotty memory dredged up from the furthest recesses of his mind that he was forced to confront. But he wasn’t the only one. Too many memories were being foisted upon her own mind. Small memories. Pearls, instead of diamonds. Stolen glances, brushes of fingers on faces, small kisses to the hollow beneath her ear.  
In the midst of her recollection, she was suddenly seized with a fierce sense of utter and complete abhorrence towards the miserable man standing not ten paces away. How dare he twist and exploit her compassionate soul in order to receive pity! After all, it was his fault that her life was moving in such a divergent, deplorable direction, with his meaningless and mad yearning for the past. There was a single question, burning like a fire in the back of her mind, growing ever brighter with each passing day, that threatened to consume her, a great question mark in the book of her life. If, theoretically, Lemony was presented with the choice between realism and illusion, in other words, his fickle want of the past, things that shall never be, or herself, which would he choose? And, with each passing day, the answer seemed to be slipping further and further away, like a dream in the morning. For some reason she couldn’t quite fathom, she walked closer to him, closer to the deep treasure trove of unanswered questions and unsupressable passions, and let her arms fall around him, a curtain after a long performance. She, almost instinctively, buried her tired face into his chest, uselessly aching for things to be different. Maybe, if she were to stand here, with phosphenes sparking across her eyelids, the smell of familiarity around her, the world would work itself out all alone; they would no longer belong to VFD and they would fade into obscurity like the sunset, yellows and oranges morphing into nothingness. She felt his tears fall on her hair. Rain. Suddenly, she was back in the serene, secluded cottage, deep in the mountains, that they shared, his arms around her, both hanging on every word of the gentle aubade sung by the early morning rain.   
Reluctantly, tentatively, she lifted her head from his chest to gaze into his luminous eyes, the color of melted molasses, and found herself confronted with a thousand emotions swimming in their depths. There was a certain childlike innocence within them, one that she loved so much, that she struggled more and more to find. Maybe he wasn’t completely to blame. Maybe she was making too harsh of a judgement. He was a victim of circumstance, as humans all are. After all, nobody is born evil. Circumstance is the refining fire that, for better or for worse, makes each individual who they are. But, isn’t labeling someone as a victim of circumstance merely a vessel by which to excuse the most deplorable of behaviors? If every evil deed were to be dismissed as purely circumstantial, then would civilization completely collapse?   
“Let’s… lets run away, from all of this. I don’t care about the sugar bowl, or glory, or the past, or… I only care about you.”  
For a mere moment, a flicker of a match, a soft flutter of a dragonfly’s wing, she saw him, in that unnaturally soft, gravelly voice. The boy who’d come up to her, stuttering and blushing, to tell her how much he loved her presentation on Shakespearian sonnets, the boy she shared so many midnight root beer float rendezvous with, the boy who, in the tumultuous hurricane of her imagination, kept her steady and peaceful with something as delicate and fleeting as the twining of his fingers with hers. Those recollections, she realized, felt opaque and vague, like they belonged to a very different girl in a very different time. Her own tears threatened to spill over, as she remembered the people they both used to be, unmarred by the complex cynicism and wickedness of the world.   
“No, we can’t…” She whispered, not even able to comprehend the sheer impossibility of his proposal. Her answer wasn’t even necessary. Judging by the hurt and hopeless things in his countenance, he already knew.   
This is exactly what the fallen world does. It tears up the beautiful masterpieces of love like worthless scraps of paper in a nervous hand; it takes those quixotic people, those who ache and see everything in the stars and believe in compassion, and undertakes a ruthless conversion to the worst kinds of cynicism and hatred, ones that cause a figurative blindness to the souls and hearts pulsing throughout the atmosphere; it ruins people. But, there is always a choice. Isn’t that the most important thing of all? The power to choose, the thing that makes everyone human? This was one of the great ironies of Lemony Snicket, she supposed. He, so terrified of becoming just as the world would make of him, has become just that through his own vain visions and renderings. She’d sacrificed everything, her best friend, her sanity, her sense of morality, just to be with him, just to be with someone who, ultimately, was who they both feared the most.   
She just stood there and allowed herself to hold him, knowing full well that this could quite possibly be the final time she felt the protection of his embrace, trying, trying, trying, to unravel the melancholy, almost otherworldly mystery of Lemony.   
“Do you think I’ll ever be happy again?”   
This was an odd question because she couldn’t particularly focus on one thing making her extremely unhappy in this precise moment. Was it the loss of her best friend? The betrayal of her lover? The murder she’d been coerced into committing? It definitely had to do with the loss of life. Not the literal loss of life, the figurative loss. The loss of her life. The loss of everything she held dear. All for some lost cause devised by her delusional lover, who would soon be gone forever.   
His answer only made things more perplexing, as his words often did. “My darling, we were happy a thousand times before we stumbled across each other on our respective journeys, and we will be happy a thousand times after our parting.”  
He was a shadow, shifting in the light, a different opinion and feeling sifting through his eyes each time she caught their ghostly stare. She, with deliberate slowness, leaned in so close, close enough to see the tears beading on his eyelashes, the dark circles under his eyes where many a sleepless night had run its course, to feel his soft breath on her cheek. They kissed, and she felt as though she were kissing a stranger. These were not his lips. Those were not his hands on the small of her back. Those were not his inhalations in between kisses. They spoke of something much too sad and old, much too enduring. It’s almost as if he’d gained a full spectrum of life experience in only a few short hours.   
The soft hum of an engine broke her musings. She’d totally forgotten. Jacques was going to take Lemony, Kit, Esme, Olaf, and herself all out to dinner after the performance had ended. There was something inexplicable, though, that told her that he already knew how very, very wrong things had gone tonight. So, she decided not to delay the inevitable. Things would never work out between them because they, ultimately, were two different souls, who wanted two different things, who just happened to be intertwined for a time. She yearned for a family, to die without stain, and he… he just wanted to be with her, even if it meant being condemned to a life of secrecy and roaming. But fading dreams and moral ambiguity, poems and mystery, only take one so far.  
She touched the diamond on her finger, almost caressing it, until it slipped off. Shaking, she held it out to him. It was in this small gesture that she finally found that delicate crossroads between a mistake and a success, a careless decision and a calculated one. All of her resolve came crashing down. Nevermind that he was the cause of all of this! He was her childhood, her past, present, and future. She loved him, more than even her keen mind could comprehend. She crashed into him, leaving no space whatsoever, attempting to will herself into merging completely with him. Feverish kisses, earnest clinging, cacophonous sobs. There was no room left for any semblance of rational thought.  
Suddenly, his arms were yanked off of her body, his presence slipping further and further away. She, in a mad frenzy, chased after Jacques, watching as he shoved his brutally weeping brother into his taxi, stopping in her tracks as she watched him, a thousand memories, broken shards of a mirror scattering, turn the corner, leaving her completely and utterly helpless. A dragonfly, one of the most beautiful she’d ever seen, had just died.


End file.
